Error Analysis And Mother Tongue Transfer

Mother tongue transfer has been a controversial issue in foreign language learning. Much empirical work on EA has been focused on determining what proportions of errors in a corpus are due to inter-lingual transfer as opposed to intra-lingual transfer since 1970s. One of the studies of this kind worth mentioning is carried out by Dulay and Burt(1974). They have selected 179 Spanish children and studied the errors made in their English learning. After the analysis of the errors, they claim that the proportion of mother tongue interference is only J3 percent. Other researches show that the mean percentage is about 30 per cent( Ellis, 2001). In China, however, the researches in this aspect are not often seen.Based on the collection of the errors from 355 compositions of the second- year students, the paper identifies 15 types of common errors and their frequency distributions. The quantitative analysis of the errors and the study of their frequency distributions show that the error frequency distributions are not distinctive. Through the quantitative analysis of the data from the questionnaires, the paper finds that, in China, the errors due to mother tongue interference amount to 21 per cent. Through the qualitative error analysis, the paper discovers that the students' uses of verb tenses, plural forms of nouns, sentence structures, articles, prepositions and cognate words are liable to be affected by their mother tongue. After a careful analysis of the students' errors, the paper puts forward suggestions that feasible measures be taken to deal with the problems in English teaching so as to improve students' proficiency in English.